Make Your Support Channels More Personalized Through Customer Experience Automation

The term customer experience covers the whole gamut of interactions customers might have with a company — from an in-store interaction with a salesperson to the impression your retargeted ads make as they’re scrolling through their social feed. And customer experience is made or broken within customer service, where you have an enhanced opportunity to improve the customer experience, and where your ability to connect personally with customers can ultimately impact your CSAT.

The assumption that automation’s “robotic responses” will take the personal touch out of your customer’s experience is quite incorrect. In fact, selective automation can customize that experience to each unique customer and their needs. Automating certain elements of your customer service is a savvy way to enhance the customer experience at specific moments in their quest to get information or seek help.

Personalized support through customer experience automation

Though plenty of companies agree that more personalized customer-service interactions are the goal, most aren’t there yet, according to a recent Forrester study, only about a fifth of firms say they’ve reached a level of “highly personalized” customer service interactions to date.

For those that are there, here are just some of the ways automation can enable personalized customer support:

Enable automation to instantly respond to incoming customer queries across channels and route queries to the right place the first time. This makes the customer feel that their concern is being immediately heard and acted upon.

Create a friction-free customer experience that’s contiguous across channels, even when an asynchronous communication model is employed. If the customer drops the conversation and picks it up later, they don’t lose the context or flow. It’s akin to a text-messaging conversation with a friend.

And most importantly, equip agents with rich customer history and contextual information, so they come into each conversation with all the information they need to have a personalized conversation with the customer right off the bat.

The same Forrester report divulges that the most useful automation technologies for personalizing customer service interactions such as these are predictive chat, chatbots, machine learning, and predictive routing. But when asked about the challenges they face in actually implementing such customer experience automation tools into their technology stack, “CX teams noted a lack of autonomy over their tools.”

The technology platform you use to power your customer service determines the degree of effectiveness of your customer experience automation efforts. Helpshift enables companies to integrate all of the technologies the Forrester report mentions within a single customer service interface so that customers experience custom, personal support — and agents and customer service managers have a process that’s efficient, trackable, and highly customizable.

Putting customer service automation in place with Helpshift

Helpshift unites all of your customer service channels — in-app messaging, web messaging, live chat, phone support and email — into one system that helps you scale a personalized customer support experience. In particular, smart use of automation at points along your customer service process render the customer experience more personal and satisfying.

For instance, you can custom-build bots to automate crucial workflows. Answer bots connected to your knowledge base surface relevant articles for customers so they can self-serve to their own answers without having to open a support ticket. This doesn’t just take the pressure off your organization; it enables a sense of autonomy for customers based on your ability to deliver accurate information quickly.

Intelligent issue classification is another excellent use of automation within your bot interfaces and in-app messaging. Helpshift automatically routes incoming customer queries to the right departments, agents or self-service options with an increasingly high degree of accuracy, thanks to AI-driven classification engines.

Automated routing also enables you to prioritize urgent cases and high-value customers so that they feel they’re getting the extra attention they deserve. These are just some of the ways you can infuse your customer service experience with personalization through automation.

More efficiency means better customer service

Customer service automation frees up agents to work on multiple cases concurrently. Seamless conversations handed off between agents and bots enable agents to focus on the higher-level issues while bots take care of rote and standard tasks.Customer experience automation is typically more efficient for companies, agents and customers.

Helpshift’s latest benchmark report found that by leveraging intelligent automation in conjunction with messaging, one agent can handle three or more conversations simultaneously. Previously agents could only handle one to two. And the content of these conversations is more meaningful when bots have already handled collecting basic information up front such as the customer’s name, account number and precise issue.

Customers, too, experience more efficiency when their issues are resolved more rapidly, and when they don’t have to explain the problem over and over to multiple agents. The integration Helpshift enables creates a more personal, gratifying experience for customers.

Make the conversations that count, count more

Helpshift has found that brands that automate customer service operations tend to maintain a higher CSAT while also making their organizations more efficient. Some of Helpshift’s biggest customers are handling 50 percent of inquiries either entirely or in part by automated workflows.